I’ve been researching ways to provide less expensive solutions to clients with very limited resources. Since I’m a Microsoft developer I looked for products built with ASP.NET.  Content management systems and shopping carts are the two primary applications I was focusing on.

I found two applications that could be used for content management, DotNetNuke and Rainbow portals. Both are open source portal systems that have evolved from the MS IBuySpy portal. Since I was a team leader a few years ago that worked with that app, I was familiar with it. Of the two, it seems DotNetNuke has more users, more modules (functionality components) and better documentation.

I installed DotNetNuke and have been playing around with the admin for a couples weeks. Seems like a pretty good FREE solution for CMS, except it lacks some workflow features like preview, an approval system and rollback, but if you can live without that, it’s hard to beat free. Besides you can always build on top of it. It’s ASP.NET and well built.